The cash and the math
Kalshi said on Thursday it secured $1 billion in new financing, putting its valuation at $40 billion. That follows a May round that pegged the company at $22 billion, after a $5 billion private valuation in October 2025.
The latest raise was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Wellington Management. In a post about the deal, Kalshi cast prediction markets as the starting point for building a broader exchange.
Product push and new markets
In late May, Kalshi announced perpetual futures as its first offering outside prediction markets, describing it as the first time a U.S. exchange would introduce that popular crypto trade. With fresh capital, it plans to build leveraged event contracts, roll out perpetuals tied to individual stocks, and create markets enabling traders to wager on compute prices.
The company also said it will keep investing in its institutional business.
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Growth drivers and the legal backdrop
Activity accelerated after the May round, helped by the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the NFL season. Those events drove a surge in combo contracts, which Kalshi likens to sportsbook parlays, alongside heavier trading in election markets ahead of the U.S. midterms.
On the regulatory front, two U.S. appeals courts - one in August and another in September - ruled that states can regulate sports-linked event contracts. Kalshi and other platforms argue that authority resides with the federal government, and a third appeals court has backed that view. The dispute will likely be resolved by the Supreme Court.
The investor angle
Kalshi said in September it was working with 500 institutional entities, and excluding market makers that group represented 25 percent of total trading volume. CEO Tarek Mansour told CNBC's Squawk Box in June that the company is considering going public, but not before 2027: "A company of our financial profile with the rate of growth that we're seeing, that sort of conversation has to happen."
Why it matters for your portfolio: a fast-growing exchange adding leveraged event contracts, stock-linked perpetuals, and compute-price markets could expand hedging and speculation tools well beyond politics and sports. If a Supreme Court ruling clarifies oversight, it sets the rules of the road for how quickly those tools scale.
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